Birth by Sleep

The Outside World

The old man had spent about a year on the boy and had decided he was not worth the trouble.

He was bald and very old, dark-skinned, with a curved silver beard and gold eyes and ears that came to points. His shoulders were broad and hunched and his back had gone crooked, and he stood with his hands folded behind him. That was how he stood while he worked. The coat he wore was black and grey with a red lining and layered pads at the shoulders, and belts crossed over the back of it in an X.

They were standing in a wasteland with dead Keyblades in it, driven into the ground where they had come to rest and left there. It went on in every direction and there was nothing else in it.

The boy was called Ventus and he was too frail to be any use. That was the finding. Xehanort had wanted a body he could put himself into eventually, and this one was not going to hold.

So he took out his Keyblade and used it to pull the darkness out of the boy's heart.

It came out. It stood up. It was a boy in a mask, about the same size, and it was awake immediately. The other one was not. "Yes, Master," it said.

What was left of Ventus went down on the stones. The heart was in pieces and it was not going to hold together long.

Xehanort carried him to a chain of islands and meant to leave him there.

What happened instead was that the broken heart reached for the nearest whole one, belonging to a child born a very short time before, and caught on it, and held.

Ventus, who was unconscious and should not have been able to do anything at all, summoned his Keyblade and put a line of light up into the sky.

Xehanort watched that happen and revised his opinion.

The castle he took him to instead stood high in grassy mountains with water running below it, and had tall spires coming off the roof, and four golden chains ran from it to two pairs of twin peaks and held it where it was.

The man who lived there had grey eyes and greying black hair to his shoulders, wavy, and a short triangular patch of beard under his lip, and a moustache, and two jagged scars across his face. He wore a long hooded white coat with wide sleeves and plum-brown trim, and under it a navy shirt with a large grey X across the front. "It seems you've settled in," Xehanort said.

He looked at the two young people in the hall behind Eraqus and made a remark about them. "You've taken on apprentices," he said. "They seem quite bright."

Then he put the boy in front of him. "Yes. His name is Ventus," he said. "I took him under my wing this past year. But I think he may be the child of destiny."

He asked Eraqus to raise him. He said the boy deserved to be guided by a true heir to light, and that he himself stood too close to the darkness, and he said it in the tone of a man conceding a small point in a long argument. "I'm sorry," he said.

He did not say what for.

Then Ventus screamed, somewhere behind them, and both of them turned.

The boy in the mask was standing in the hall. "You were to wait at the badlands," Xehanort said.

The masked boy had an opinion about Ventus and gave it. "He ain't gonna cut it," he said. "Somebody's gotta break that loser in."

"I did this for him. Not you."

Whatever the masked boy said to that, Xehanort answered it with his hand on his Keyblade. "Hold your tongue, boy. You may be pure darkness, but you are no match for my blade."

The masked boy went.

Ventus woke with no memory of any of it, and Eraqus told him he had always been here.

He was small and blond, with blue eyes and a round face.

The other two came and stood over him.

The young man was tall and built heavy for his age, with brown hair to the base of his neck, spiked up on top and falling over his face at the front, and blue eyes, and skin a little tanned. He wore a dark grey shirt with a high collar and short sleeves, and two red straps crossed over his chest, and his left arm was mostly in armour. "So, are you here to train with us?" he said. "Where are you from? Who was that man with you? You good with a Keyblade?"

"Ventus cannot tell you anything," Eraqus said, "because he cannot remember anything."

The young woman had blue eyes and bright blue hair cut choppy and parted on the left, chin-length at the front and down over her neck behind. Navy and black halter top with a high collar and an open back, a black corset laced at both sides, black shorts, black stockings to mid-thigh. Two pink straps crossed over her chest with a silver mark where they met, and a long piece of blue cloth hung over each hip past the knee. Her sleeves were white and detached, with three segments of silver and dull purple armour on them.

Their names were Terra and Aqua. They took to him almost immediately. It was not a thing either of them decided.

Terra gave him a wooden Keyblade. He said the words of the inheritance rite over it while he did it, as a joke, the way a person knights somebody with a stick.

"In your hand, take this key. And so long as you have the makings, then through this simple act of taking, its wielder you shall one day be made."

Ven kept it.

Wayfinders

Four years went by like that.

The castle had a forecourt, and a path up the mountain with small trees along it and thin waterfalls coming down beside it, and at the top of the path a summit where the three of them went to do nothing. The great hall below was spacious and covered in gold ornament, with tall stained glass windows that were the only thing lighting it, and three thrones at the top of the room.

The night before the examination there was a meteor shower, and they went up.

Ven was lying on his back with his eyes shut when Aqua came up behind him.

"Ven, you hopeless sleepyhead."

"Whoa! Gimme a break, Aqua."

"A meteor shower!"

The three of them lay out on the rock and watched it come down. "Y'ever wonder what stars are?" Ven said. "Where light comes from?"

Terra told him. "That every star up there is another world," he said. "Yep, hard to believe there are so many worlds out there besides our own. The light is their hearts, and it's shining down on us like a million lanterns."

Ven asked something else after that and got a different kind of answer. "You're too young to know now," Terra said.

"Quit treating me like a kid."

Aqua laughed at the pair of them. "I can't help it," she said. "You two would make the weirdest brothers."

"Oy, sometimes you are such a girl," Terra said.

She had made them something. "Oh yeah. Terra, you and I have our Mark of Mastery exams tomorrow," she said. "I made us good luck charms. Here!"

Three of them, one each, star-shaped, made of stained glass in silver frames, each one marked with the emblem of Mastery. "So this isn't a real good luck charm?" Ven said.

"Of course. One for each of us," she said. "Somewhere out there, there's this tree with star-shaped fruit, and the fruit represents an unbreakable connection. So as long as you and your friends carry good luck charms shaped like it, nothing can ever drive you apart. You'll always find your way back to each other. Technically, I think you're supposed to make them with seashells, but I did the best with what I had."

"An unbreakable connection," she said.

She had put a spell on them to make up for the shells. "Well, tomorrow's the exam," Terra said. "Anybody wanna spar?"

"Trust me, you guys are ready," Ven said. "You're gonna clean up at the exam tomorrow."

"I hope it's that easy," Terra said.

Nobody sparred. They stayed where they were until the shower was over.

It was the last night the three of them spent in the same place.

The Examination

The examination was Xehanort's idea.

Eraqus had meant to give the two of them the title and be done with it. They were the youngest prospects he had seen in years and he had watched them come up and he did not think there was anything left to find out. He had written to his old friend to say so, and to invite him to come and watch it happen.

The letter that came back said that Terra was open to darkness, and that a formal test would be the responsible thing, and that he would of course be delighted to attend.

Eraqus set the test.

He put it to them in the hall under the stained glass, with the old man standing off to one side of the thrones. "Today you will be examined for the Mark of Mastery. Not one but two of the Keyblade's chosen stand here as candidates, but this is neither a competition nor a battle for supremacy, not a test of wills, but a test of heart. Both of you may prevail, or neither. But I am sure our guest, Master Xehanort, did not travel all this way to see our youngest prospects in years fall short of the Mark. I trust you are ready."

Ven was not a candidate. Ven was watching from the side of the room, where he had been told to be. "Then let the examination begin."

The first part of it was orbs of light. Eraqus called them up and set them loose and the two of them were to put them down, and the point of it was the heart and not the arithmetic.

Xehanort corrupted them where nobody could see him do it.

He did not move. The light in the orbs went black and they stopped behaving like a test.

One of them broke off from the rest and went for the boy at the side of the room.

Ven put his Keyblade through it. "But Ven, you're in danger here!" Aqua said. "Go wait in your room."

"Don't worry about me. You two focus on the exam!"

"He can take care of himself," Terra said. "He's been out there training just as hard as us."

Eraqus said the thing a man says when he has decided to carry on. "That was unexpected, but one must keep a still heart."

The second part was the two of them against each other.

It went the way sparring goes between people who have sparred for years, until Terra's hand went dark.

It came up his arm and sat on his hand and he saw it there. He stopped, and put it down, and got it back under. It took him a moment and the moment was the whole examination.

Xehanort watched him do it with his hands folded behind his back. "We have deliberated and reached a decision. Terra, Aqua, you both performed commendably. However, only Aqua has shown the Mark of Mastery. Terra, you failed to keep the darkness within you sufficiently in check. But there is always next time. That is all. Aqua, as our newest Keyblade Master, you are entitled to certain knowledge. Please wait here for further instruction."

Terra stood in the hall and said it out loud. "The darkness. Where did it come from?"

Nobody answered him. Aqua started to and he stopped her. "Sorry, but I need some time alone."

He went out. Aqua stayed where she had been told to wait.

What Eraqus taught her was what a Master is for, which turned out to be less about fighting than she had expected. There was a Keyhole in this world, as there was in every world, and there was a way to find it and a way to seal it, and the Master's Defender was the key that did it. If the Land of Departure were ever threatened, she was to seal it, and that was not a last resort. That was the duty.

"And insomuch as you are now Keyblade Master, you must always be conscious of."

He never finished it.

Xehanort found Terra where Terra had gone to be alone. It was not difficult. There were not many places to go. "Yes. You are indeed strong," he said. "The darkness is nothing to fear."

"But why?" Terra said. "Help me understand, Master Xehanort. What is it that I have failed to learn?"

"You're fine as you are. Darkness cannot be destroyed. It can only be channeled."

He put it to him as a technical correction. The boy had been taught that the thing in him was a fault and that the work was to crush it. That was one way to look at it and it was not the only way and it was, if he might say so, not a very useful one.

Terra said the thing he had been saying to himself for a while, and it came out sounding like an argument he had won. "There's darkness within me. So what does that matter? I know I'm strong enough to hold it back."

Xehanort agreed with him.

Outside on the cliffs the masked boy was waiting. He had been told not to do that.

Xehanort told him again not to cause trouble here. "I know that," the masked boy said. "He just needs a little incentive to leave home."

The Unversed were already out. They had been going out across the worlds for some time, on the old man's instructions, for two reasons that did not have to be explained twice. One was to put something in front of Ventus hard enough to make him fight. The other was to make the worlds bad enough that Terra would be sent into them.

The masked boy found Ventus at the castle a little after that. "Better hurry, Ventus," he said. "Or you'll never see Terra again."

"Like right now? He's leaving you behind. And by the time you catch up, he'll be a different person."

"Look, whoever you are, you don't know the first thing about Terra," Ven said. "Me and him will always be a team. You trying to pick a fight or what?"

"Oh, grow up. Is that what you call friendship? You'll never know the truth unless you go out and look for it yourself. Come on, what could you possibly know when you're stuck here, looking at nothing but what's in your tiny world?"

"Exactly what I said, idiot. The Terra you know will be gone forever."

Ven told him that was stupid. "Stupid, or true."

"Good. Let's see what you're made of."

They fought. It did not last long and it ended with the masked boy stepping back out of it. "Hmph, you win. Consider yourself on probation."

He left.

Eraqus called Terra and Aqua in and told them what he had.

Yen Sid had sent word. There were things appearing across the worlds and there was now a name for them, which was the Unversed, and what they were was fledgling emotions that had taken monster form. They were turning up everywhere and they were going after the Princesses of Heart.

And Master Xehanort was gone. "Master Xehanort is gone?" Terra said.

The orders were to destroy the Unversed and to find Xehanort. They were given the Lanes Between to do it in. That was normally forbidden. And Eraqus put it to Terra as an opportunity, in those words, because a second look at the Mark was exactly what the boy wanted to hear and Eraqus meant it besides.

"Thank you, Master. I swear, I will not fail you again."

He kept Aqua back after. "Wait, Aqua. Before you depart, I have one other. Well, call it a request, of the utmost priority. I told Terra this could be a second chance to show the Mark of Mastery, and I meant it. However, that flicker of darkness he displayed during the examination, I can sense it runs very deep. If he were to. If those powers were to prove too much for him to handle, I want you to bring him back to me at once. It's for his own good. I could not bear to lose any of you to the darkness."

"Of course. I would never let that happen. I promise you I will bring Terra back. Only this time, you'll see he has what it takes to be a Master. He's not as weak as you think."

Ven went out after them without permission and without telling anybody. "No! He mustn't!" Eraqus said. "You have to bring him back!"

So Aqua left with two errands, and only one of them was the one she had been given in front of witnesses.

Three Roads

The armour came out of what they were already wearing. A boot, a belt, a plate at the shoulder, and when the shoulder was pressed the rest of it arrived in a flash of light and closed over them, and that was what kept the dark between worlds off a person while they crossed it. The Keyblade went up in the air and came down as something to ride. Terra's was built like a bike. Ven's was a board. Aqua's was two pieces, a bow and a platform, and she stood on it.

They went out one after another and did not travel together.

Terra came down in a country where nobody had been awake for a long time.

The Unversed were already in it. He recognised them from the briefing and said so out loud. "Monsters! The ones the Master mentioned, these are the Unversed!"

The woman he met there was not surprised by him and did not ask what a Keyblade was.

"I'm Terra. What do you know about those monsters, the ones who attacked me?"

She said she knew nothing about them. She said a great many things she knew nothing about, at length, and the whole of it moved gently in one direction, which was upstairs, where a young woman had been asleep for years and would go on sleeping. Her heart, said Maleficent, held the key to controlling all worlds. She would like it very much if he would take it.

"You seem to be mixed up. I'm a peacekeeper, not a tyrant!"

That is where the conversation ended and the other thing started.

She put him under. He did not see it coming.

What he saw next was the room, and the sleeping woman, and the heart gone out of her, and Maleficent telling him that he had done it.

He took her word for it. He took her word for it that day and he went on taking her word for it, and he said so out loud more than once afterwards to people who had no idea what he was talking about.

She offered him work. There were seven hearts of pure light in the worlds and she meant to have all seven, and she thought he might like to be the one who fetched them.

He turned that down as well.

"No more games. Where is Master Xehanort?"

She went, and left the castle full of Unversed, and he stayed to deal with them because there was nobody else to do it. "The Unversed. They're going to bring down the castle. I have to do something!"

Afterwards he stood over the woman who was still asleep and apologised to her. "It's my fault her light was stolen. It was because I was weak. I'm sorry. I'll get your light back, once I learn to stand up against the darkness."

Then he stood there a while longer and went at the other end of it. "Why would Master Xehanort imprison the light?" he said. "The purest hearts of light, do they hold the answer?"

What he took away from that country was this. That there were Princesses of Heart. That there were seven of them. And that a woman he had never met in a world he had never been to already knew about other worlds, and about the Keyblade, and about the three people who carried one, and about Kingdom Hearts, because somebody had told her.

In a wood some way from there a queen kept a mirror.

"A mirror that knows and sees everything. How about that?"

It was a white theatre mask hanging in the glass, lit from nowhere and unevenly, the eyebrows set high, holes where the eyes and the mouth should be and the back of the face black behind them. Round the frame ran chiselled tiles carrying the twelve signs. It answered any question it was asked truthfully, and it answered in the manner of a thing that has been asked a great many questions and has stopped finding any of them interesting.

"My name is Terra. I'm looking for a man named Xehanort. Master Xehanort. I thought maybe you might have seen him."

The queen had a price. There was a girl in the wood called Snow White, and the queen wanted her dead, and she wanted the heart brought back to her, and the mirror would be his afterwards to ask what he liked.

Terra thought about it. He did not refuse immediately. "A heart of light. This Snow White is my best chance right now. Maybe she will lead me closer to Master Xehanort. But what if I. No, I won't let that happen."

He found the girl and asked her one question, which was not the queen's question.

"Does the name Xehanort mean anything to you?"

She did not. He left her where she was and went back and told the queen what he had decided. "A request I chose to ignore. You know, you claim to be radiant, but all I see are shadows of jealousy, hanging thick on your heart."

She put him into the mirror for that. There was a thing living in there and he fought it and it lost.

"Now, you will ask the mirror. Where can I find Master Xehanort?"

The mirror said he was in a wasteland where a great battle had been fought.

"Is that all? Thanks. You've been a big help."

Aqua caught up with him at a castle where a ball was being held, and caught up with him is the wrong phrase, because he was leaving as she arrived.

She asked him about the worlds he had been through and he did not enjoy the question.

She asked about Ven. Ven had run away. Neither of them had known that until she said it. "No. Actually. Just before I left, he tried to tell me something," Terra said. "I should have listened to what he had to say."

He told her about a girl in that house whose whole situation was hopeless and who had gone to the ball anyway.

"There's this girl here, her name is Cinderella. She made me realize how powerful it is just to believe. No matter how impossible things seem, a powerful enough dream will always be enough to light the darkness. If you see her, give her my thanks."

He told her something else. The Unversed answered to a boy in a mask.

Then he went, and she watched him go. "He'll be all right," she said. "He won't give in to it."

The house that girl came out of had three women in it, and Aqua walked into it and knew inside a minute. "As I feared. There is darkness here."

"There was something very wrong about them."

She had been taught one thing about darkness and she had been taught it thoroughly, and the thing was that it needs to be destroyed. She had her Keyblade out and she was going to do it.

The old woman who stopped her was not a fighter and did not raise her voice. What she told Aqua was that light and darkness have to exist alongside each other, and that if you find darkness sitting on a person the thing to do is not to attack it. The thing to do is to help the light that is already in them. "Then I'm honored," Aqua said. "But why would you advise me not to fight darkness with light?"

"A pure heart filled with light. It's strange, the Master taught me darkness needs to be destroyed. But how, if not with light?"

She found the girl afterwards and thanked her for something the girl had not known she was doing. "I actually want to thank you, for teaching Terra he needs to keep believing."

The tower stood by itself and was mostly staircase. The room at the top was the largest room in it and had bookshelves and pots and windows cut in the shapes of stars and a crescent.

The sorcerer in it had a long grey beard parted down the middle and enormous bushy eyebrows and eyes that were mostly white around very small pupils, and he kept them open. He wore a tall blue cone of a hat with yellow stars and a yellow crescent moon on it, and blue robes lined in sky blue and dark red inside.

Something small came past Terra on the stairs at speed, said a word, and vanished in a flash of light. "Alakazam!"

Terra went up. "Master Yen Sid. My name is Terra."

"Yes. Eraqus's pupil. I've been expecting you. It is the Unversed."

Terra called him Master and was corrected. "I am no longer a Master. I doffed that mantle."

"Yes, Master Yen Sid. I thought it best to seek the counsel of one wiser than myself."

"I'm not sure I even understand what's wrong. Master Xehanort is missing. And now I've learned there's a masked boy who is controlling those Unversed on the loose."

The sorcerer told him to consider that those two things might be one thing.

"Master Xehanort and the Unversed are connected somehow?"

"I must not make assumptions. Find Xehanort, Terra. That is where you should begin."

Terra went down the stairs. The sorcerer stayed where he was and said something to a man who was not in the room. "I had hoped, Xehanort, your heart would no longer lead you astray."

The wasteland was where the mirror had said it would be.

Terra came down into it. The Keyblades stood in the ground at the angles they had fallen at, and there was nothing else.

Xehanort was waiting and had the whole thing ready.

The masked boy was called Vanitas. He was not a person; he was pure darkness with a shape on it. And Xehanort had taken him out of Ventus, because Ventus's heart had been so far gone into darkness that there was nothing else left to try, and it had worked, and the boy had lived, and the cost of it was that the heart he was left with had been damaged in the taking. That was the account. "I have been to other worlds. I know all about the things you've done," Terra said. "I just don't understand why."

"Master Xehanort. Ventus has gotten a lot better since then. You shouldn't blame yourself for trying to save him."

He was consoling him.

Then he was asked to destroy Vanitas, and he agreed, and Xehanort thanked him and used a form of address he had no right to.

"Don't worry, Master. I'll take care of Vanitas."

Master Terra, said Xehanort.

The dwarfs in the wood decided Ventus was a thief, and there were seven of them, so it took a while to be told so seven times. "That's not nice, treating me like some kind of bad guy," he said. "I'm just trying to find a friend. His name is Terra. He's dressed kind of like me, about yay tall."

What they had against Terra was that a tall man dressed kind of like him had been through, and monsters had come with him, and Snow White had gone missing after. They had put those in an order and got an answer.

"Fine, I get it. You want me to leave, I'll leave. Oh, but, can you tell me where I can find some other people around here?"

He went off to prove them wrong, which meant finding the girl.

He found her in the wood being frightened by things and put himself in front of them. "Back off!"

"Well, I saw a house just up ahead. Come on, I'll take you there. Oh, I'm Ventus. Ven for short."

In a meadow further on he met an old woman who had a great deal to say about Terra.

She said Terra had come to her castle and put a Keyblade to her and demanded to be told where Xehanort was. She said it sadly, the way people deliver bad news about somebody else's friend. "That doesn't sound like him at all," Ven said. "Ma'am, where did Terra go?"

He did not believe her. He carried it away with him anyway.

The country where the young woman was asleep had three fairies in it who took one look at Ventus and said his heart was pure. "Wha. Oh, I'm sorry. It's just, I've never seen anyone so beautiful."

They got him up the mountain and into the place where the heart was being kept, and he got it loose.

"That should do it."

He saw some of what she had been dreaming while it went past him. It was a man she was waiting for.

Maleficent told him Terra had stolen it.

"That's a lie!"

He fought her over it and was still angry about it long after.

Aqua arrived in that same place and heard the same sentence from the same mouth.

She started to believe it.

Ven would not come home. She told him he was in danger and he told her he was not going and he went. "Sorry, Aqua. But I can't go with you."

Maleficent put her in a cell under the castle for her trouble. There was a man already in it, and the three fairies came down and gave him a sword and a shield and told him what they were for.

"I'm going with you. There's something I need to know, and Maleficent has the answer."

"You don't even know the first thing about it," Aqua told her. "You're too clouded by darkness to see that there's something greater. Try all you want, but you'll never defeat a heart filled with light."

At the top of the mountain Maleficent stopped being a woman and became a dragon, and the fire came down green between Aqua and the thing, and it was the man with the sword who ended it.

"It's the power of true love that defeated you."

She left for Radiant Garden after Terra and lost him on the way. "Terra. You better stay strong for me."

Ventus went after the masked boy instead, and the masked boy let him catch up, and the place he let him catch up in was the wasteland.

"All right! What did you mean about Terra being a different person?"

It was not a fight. It went one way from the beginning and ended with Ven on the ground. "That really all you got? Man, you are worthless. I'd be going against the Master's orders, but so what? As far as I'm concerned, your job here is done."

Ven asked him where the Unversed came from. He got an answer, and it was a long one. "It happened when you and I were split into two. The negativity took shape as these monsters. They are what I feel, a horde of fledgling emotions under my control. I released them in all the worlds I could, hoping to lure you away from home and isolate you from your Master. We needed to make you stronger. The Unversed were the perfect opponents. And better yet, no matter how many times you defeat them, their negativity flows right back into me. You never stood a chance against us, Ventus."

Ven had no idea what he was talking about and did not get the chance to ask, because something came out of the sky and stood between them.

It was a mouse, and it was about waist high, and it had a Keyblade.

"Don't worry! You're safe."

"Tell me where you got that! Keyblades are not something you use just to bully somebody around! Here, I'll show ya!"

"We both will!" Ven said.

The two of them drove the masked boy off between them. He did not seem to mind particularly.

The mouse's name was Mickey and he was somebody's apprentice and he had left without saying so. "Yep. I've been trainin' under the great Yen Sid. He found out the worlds are in trouble, an' I sorta took off without tellin' him."

"Well, that makes both of us. I ran off, too."

What he had taken with him was a shard of something that moved him between worlds, and he was honest about how well he could work it.

"All I hafta do is think it, and the Star Shard will take me anywhere I wanna go. At least I thought it would. I haven't quite got the fine points down, like, when, or where. It just kinda kicks in whenever it wants to. But I wouldn't have met you if it hadn't brought me here."

It went off while he was holding it.

"Ya know, it might not be an accident. Maybe it starts workin' 'cause it's reactin' to somethin'."

It took both of them, and where it put them down was a city.

There were other worlds and they went through them.

There was a town built around a festival, where the rules were explained to Terra by a queen and broken constantly by a large cat in two different costumes. There was a coliseum where a god offered to teach Terra how to conquer the darkness and meant something else by it. There was a ship among the stars with a small blue animal on it that stole Terra's charm and gave it back once it was explained. There was an island where nobody grew up, and a pirate, and a chest that was supposed to have light in it and had ordinary loot in it instead, and Terra apologised to a boy for starting the fight.

All three of them passed through most of those places and kept missing each other. They had set out from the same house and they were three people alone in different worlds now.

Radiant Garden

The city was a place where people lived.

It had a castle at the top of it in pale colours and a town underneath full of trees and grass and flowers, and walls around the town with enormous fountains set into them and climbing plants over everything, and past the walls an ocean and green mountains a long way off. The square in the middle of it had flowers and trees and houses all round the edge. There was a court where fountains stood layered one above another, and gardens on a scale that took a while to cross, and out past those a platform shaped like a lotus sitting in water with more flower beds on it.

Ventus tried to get into the castle and was stopped at the doors by two of the guard.

One of them was tall and broad in the shoulder with black dreadlocks tied back low and one of them left hanging over the right side of his face, thick sideburns, heavy eyebrows, violet eyes. He wore a dark slate grey uniform with a curled heart on it and white gloves and knee-high black boots, and he carried a lance with a blue head and a handle that went from violet to silver. The other was in the same grey with white cuffs and a red heart at the chest and blue hearts on the backs of his gloves, and what he carried was an axe.

"But somebody just came this way! He's a friend of mine."

They did not move.

A man in a white coat had been watching him from further off than he needed to be.

He had light green eyes and wore the coat over a grey waistcoat and a white collared shirt and a purple ascot, which was what the men who worked in that castle wore.

What he had noticed about the boy, and what he said out loud to nobody, was that there was no darkness in him. Not a small amount. None. "Oh. You're on your own, huh? Sir, I'm looking for a friend of mine," Ven said. "He's a tall guy dressed kinda like me, have you seen him?"

The Unversed came into the town while he was in it.

He got an old duck in a top hat out of the way of them and was thanked at a length he had not budgeted for. "Well, could ya make it fast?"

He got an old man in a blue coat and a pointed hat inside a door. "Mister, get inside. It's not safe out here."

And he got a small boy out from under them, in the street, by picking him up and moving him.

The boy had steel-blue hair parted unevenly so that the longer side covered the right of his face and left one bright blue eye showing, and he wore the same white coat as the man in a size that did not fit him, the sleeves rolled and still over his hands.

The man in the white coat came and took the child and thanked Ven properly this time, and said the boy was an orphan and in his care.

The duck gave Ven three lifetime passes to a town he had never heard of, for no reason except that he had them. "Lifetime passes to Disney Town. He said to. He said to take two grown-ups."

He had two in mind.

Two boys about his own age were sitting up above the square with nothing to do.

One had bright red hair spiked upward off a slight widow's peak and blue-green eyes, and wore a sleeveless orange jacket over a white sleeveless shirt, tan baggy trousers, red and white shoes, and a yellow and brown cloth wound round his neck, striped along its length and gone to a checkerboard near the throat and frayed at the bottom. The other had bright blue hair swept back into spikes with two sections left down by his ears, turquoise eyes, a high-collared navy jacket with sleeves to the elbow half unzipped from the bottom over a black undershirt, white trousers, silver stud earrings, and a small yellow crescent moon over the left breast.

The red-haired one wanted to fight. He had a weapon that went out and came back and he was proud of it and he was looking for somebody to be proud of it at. "Fight? Why would I wanna do that?" Ven said.

They fought anyway and Ven won, and the boy declared them friends on the strength of it.

What he wanted, he said, was to be remembered. Not to be famous. To be in the memory of every single person he ever met, permanently, so that as long as any of them was alive there was still somebody carrying him about.

The blue-haired one had heard all this before and said nothing.

Somewhere else in the same city Aqua came round a corner and found a very small girl being chased. The girl was called Kairi.

She was four. She had on a white shirt cut like an apron with blue flowers on it and a blue line across the chest, a pink skirt with a white line, and large white shoes with pink and purple on them. "I can feel the light," Aqua said.

The mouse came down into the square out of nothing at all and the two of them held it together.

"Hurry! Ya gotta get that girl to someplace that's safe."

"I sense light within this girl," Aqua said. "You think that's why they attacked her?"

"And I'm Mickey. I used to be Yen Sid's apprentice. I came back to him for some more training."

He was pulled out of the world in the middle of saying something else.

"Let's join forces! Oh no, not now! I'll be okay! See ya real soon!"

What happened next happened because the child was frightened.

She took hold of Aqua's Keyblade with both hands, the way a child takes hold of an adult's arm, and that is the whole of the inheritance rite. Nobody said the words. Nobody meant anything by it.

The girl gave her flowers afterwards, because that was what she had.

Aqua put a spell on the charm the child was wearing before she went. "Wait, Kairi, just a minute. I just cast a magic spell on you. One day when you're in trouble, the light within you will lead you to the light of another. Someone to keep you safe."

Her grandmother came and collected her and told them both an old story while she did it, about a time when there was nothing but light, and everybody lived in it, and then it went.

The masked boy came into the square not long after that and Aqua knew him from a description. "A mask? You're the boy that Ventus mentioned."

"Ah yes, Ventus. Tell me something, has he learned to put up a decent fight yet?"

She asked him what he wanted with Ven. "I'll be asking the questions. And why shouldn't I? After all, between the two of us, I'm the only one who will walk away from here alive."

He was wrong about that. She put him down and he got up and did not appear to be embarrassed.

"Not bad at all. Congratulations. I'll keep you around. Never hurts to have a backup."

He was gone before she worked out what he had said.

The thing that brought the three of them into the same street at the same time was a machine.

It came apart and put itself back together, and the three of them dealt with it without discussing how. "We make a good team," Aqua said.

They never fought side by side again.

Then Ven said something about the boy in the mask. "It's okay, Aqua. Trust me, that guy in the mask is history," he said. "He'll never bad-mouth Terra again."

"You saw the boy in the mask?" Terra said.

He said it too quickly. Aqua heard how quickly he said it. "I'm not so sure. I've been to the same worlds as you and I've seen what you've done," she said. "You shouldn't put yourself so close to the darkness."

Terra told them both to go home.

Then Aqua told him why she could not, and the sentence came out with everything in it. "You mean you've been spying on me?" Terra said. "Is that what he said to do? The Master's orders?"

He went, on his own.

"Master Xehanort is the only one I can still count on."

Ven started after him and Aqua stopped him.

"Why won't you let me?"

"I don't want to put you in harm's way. You understand?"

"So now you know the truth," she said. "But the Master loves Terra, and you know that too."

He told her she had changed. He said it standing in the street with both of them watching Terra's back go round a corner, and then he went after him.

Under the castle there was a place where the water was cleaned, and a man was waiting in it.

He had brown eyes and dark hair to his shoulders worn slicked back, and a guard's uniform in dark slate grey with silver on it and two rows of gold buttons, black boots to the knee, and a red scarf that had seen better years. He carried two arrowguns shaped like crossbows, silver and a faded metallic purple.

"You must be Terra. It's that old coot, he won't stop asking for you."

"Ha! Do I have to spell it out? Xehanort, whatever he's called. You know, my prisoner."

"You're apparently not a very good liar," Terra said. "Master Xehanort would never let himself be caught by a thug like you."

"As if! I've got the old coot at my mercy, see for yourself."

"There's no way it's true, but no harm in looking."

Xehanort was up on the viaduct in chains. "The old coot certainly knows how to take punishment," Braig said. "Just like I know how to deal it out."

"You monster! What are you after?"

"That thing right there. It's called the Keyblade, isn't it?"

"Well, you'll find they're picky about their owners."

"Ha, if I heard the old guy right, you're what they call Keyblade Master material."

He wanted it handed over. He said what he would do to the prisoner if it was not.

"Ah-ah, one more step and the coot goes boom. You think I'm gonna fight fair? As if!"

And from up in the chains the old man told Terra to use his darkness.

"But Master, you'll."

It went badly for Braig. "Hmph. For a Keyblade Master, you're not very, what's the word, good."

Terra put dark fire into his face and took the right eye out of his head and left a jagged scar over the left cheek. "Hey, you old coot! You said I wouldn't get hurt!"

The whole of it had been arranged between the two of them beforehand. Braig had been promised something he wanted and had agreed to stand there and be the occasion, and what Xehanort had wanted out of it was to watch Terra choose darkness under pressure and succeed with it. The only part that had not been agreed was the face.

Braig went for him about it and was put down with a look and a raised hand, and settled for what he had been promised.

Xehanort opened his own heart and put a piece of it into him.

Afterwards Braig's eyes were gold and his ears had gone pointed, and he took to wearing a patch over the socket where the right eye had been.

Xehanort turned round and told Terra what he had just seen.

A man who could hold light and darkness in the same hand and use whichever was needed. That was not a failing. That was the rarest thing in the worlds and the boy had been raised by somebody who was frightened of it.

Eraqus is afraid of you, he said. That is what the watching is for.

And then he offered him a place, formally, as his apprentice.

"This power. But I was consumed by anger, hatred. That was the power of darkness."

He left without answering, and he was not disturbed by the offer. He was disturbed by how little effort the rest of it had taken.

"No. I succumbed to it. Just like when I stole Princess Aurora's heart of light. I can never return home now. I'm a failure."

Ven caught him at the edge of the city and asked to come with him.

Terra said no. He did not say it unkindly and he did not explain it, and what he said instead was the thing Ven kept afterwards.

"I just. When I really need you, Ven, I know you'll be there."

"Well, why wouldn't I? You're my friend."

Two Boys

Terra went to the islands because something there was warm and he followed it.

They were small. There was a main island with yellow sand and wooden things built on it, a shack by the water, a tower with a rope run down from it, a treehouse put into a tree that was much larger than the tree needed to be. A bridge went across to a smaller island beside it, and on the smaller island a palm tree grew out crooked over the water and carried fruit shaped like stars. Behind the waterfall there was a cave, and the walls of the cave were covered in chalk.

Two boys were on the beach. One was four and one was five. The younger one had light brown hair that lay flat.

The older one looked at Terra once and asked him whether he had come from somewhere else. Not from another island. From outside.

Terra looked at him for slightly too long and did not say what he was looking at.

Then he put his hand out and did the thing properly, with all of it, to a five-year-old on a beach.

"In your hand, take this Key. So long as you have the makings, then through this simple act of taking, its wielder you shall one day be. And you will find me, friend, no ocean will contain you then. No more borders around, or below, or above, so long as you champion the ones you love."

He had never been named a Master.

Aqua came to the same beach some while after and did not know he had been there. "Terra. Ven. I hope we're ready for the storm that's coming."

The two boys were still on it. She looked at them for a while before she said anything.

"This boy looks so sincere, just like Terra. And this one, he's the spitting image of Ven. One of you might be special enough. Hey, you two mind telling me your names?"

They told her. The younger one was Sora and the older one was Riku.

She looked at the older one first and knew before she had finished looking.

"Someone has already passed this boy the power. Was it Terra? Sora, do you like Riku?"

Then she reached out to the younger one, and stopped, with her hand where it was.

She did not finish what she had started and she did not say why.

What she did instead was ask him for something.

"So then if something happens, and Riku is about to get lost, or say, he starts wandering down a dark path alone, you make sure to stay with him and keep him safe. That's your job, Sora, and I'm counting on you to do it, okay?"

He said yes.

She went back up the beach.

"One Keyblade is enough, for any friendship. I learned it the hard way. I wouldn't wish our lives on those children. Terra, please tell me, what's to become of us?"

A Forgotten Past

On the island where nobody grew up there was a chest, and the boys who lived there kept in it the things that mattered to them, which were not valuable.

Ventus put the wooden Keyblade in. "It's, just something that one of my best friends gave me."

He did it because he had decided he was going to make better ones. The three of them were going to be together after this and there would be years of it and he did not need to carry the first thing any more.

Aqua came to that island afterwards and was made leader of a treasure hunt by a boy who could fly, on the grounds that somebody had to be.

The treasure was the chest and the chest was full of junk.

She went through it and found the wooden Keyblade in it.

When she turned round the masked boy was holding it. "So, have a good time hanging out with the kiddies?"

"I think that kid's outgrown such a childish toy, if you ask my opinion. Just like I've outgrown my need for you."

He broke it in half in front of her.

"You freak!"

She beat him so badly she thought she had killed him, and when it was over she went down on the sand and could not get up again, and the boy who could fly came and found her there.

"It's okay, Peter. Whatever it is that binds us together isn't going to break so easily, and that's our real treasure. I think Ventus knew that. That's why he left this behind."

She had not killed him. She was holding the two pieces of the wooden Keyblade when she said it.

Somewhere else in the same world the masked boy took the mouse and carried him to the wasteland.

The shard put Ven down at the tower.

A duck and a large dog met him at the door and mistook him for their king, and got over it, and took him up. "Ah, Ventus. Eraqus has told me much about you. If I am not mistaken, you were ordered to return home."

"I ran into Mickey. But we got sent flying into the light, I don't know where he went. He wasn't in the same world as the one where I found that."

"Where is this clue to Mickey's whereabouts?"

The sorcerer looked for him and found him, and where he was was the wasteland, lying down and not moving.

"As I thought. Mickey has been hurling himself from one world to the next."

The duck and the dog volunteered. "You two? That may not be adequate."

"Very well, Ventus. We will leave it to you."

The mouse was where the sorcerer had said and was breathing.

Xehanort was standing further off, waiting, and had been for some time.

What he did to Ven he did without touching him. He gave him back the year that had been taken out of him, all of it, in the place where it had happened, standing on the same stones.

Ven remembered being his apprentice.

He remembered a wasteland with things coming out of the ground in it, and himself much smaller, and asking not to be made to do it.

"Please don't do this, Master. I'm not strong enough."

He remembered the rest of it too. The Keyblade coming out and going in. The thing standing up out of him.

Then he was told what he was for.

There was a weapon, Xehanort said, and it was not one of the Keyblades that he and Ven and anybody else carried. It was the other thing.

"Not the Keyblades you and I carry. The x. A most ancient letter. Some say kye, but the meaning is the same. Death. A letter that spells endings."

It could be made, and it could be made one way only. The two halves of what had been taken apart in this place had to come back together, and they had to do it by fighting. "And I have the power to make it?" Ven said.

He was told that he did. He was told that it was the only reason he had ever been picked up.

And he was told one more thing. The man who had raised him for the last four years had not been keeping him safe. He had been keeping him where he could see him.

Xehanort opened a hole in the air and put him through it, back the way he had come.

The Land of Departure

Ven came in through the front of the castle and did not stop walking until he was in the hall. "That's your excuse, for keeping me imprisoned here, isn't it?"

"What did you hear?" Eraqus said.

Ven told him what he had heard and Eraqus did not deny any part of it. He stood in his own hall in front of his own thrones and said it out loud, and the man he was talking about was not in the room.

"I knew it. Xehanort, he could never let it go."

"I failed. I had the chance to stop him and couldn't do it. But I will not fail again."

What he had worked out was simple and he had worked it out some time before this conversation started.

The weapon could only be made one way and one of the two halves it needed was standing in front of him. Xehanort could not be stopped. The weapon could. And there was one method available, and the method was in his hand.

He raised the Master's Defender.

"The x-blade has no place in this or any world. Xehanort has made his purpose clear, and I am left with no choice. Forgive me, but you must exist no more."

"Master! What are you."

Terra had been told that Ven had gone home to confront his Master and that he was in danger, and he had been told it by somebody who knew exactly how long the journey took.

He came in and there was a man with a Keyblade up and a boy underneath it.

Eraqus told him to stand aside. "You may be my Master. But I will not, let you hurt my friend!"

"Why do all my attempts to reach you fail? If you don't have it in your heart to obey, then you will have to share Ventus's fate."

So it was going to be both of them.

Terra opened a corridor of darkness in the middle of his Master's hall, which is a thing he had been taught never to do, and put Ven into it and closed it. Where it let him out was the islands.

Then he turned round.

He used darkness to do it and he used a great deal of it, and it worked.

"What have I done. Master. I just. Wanted to keep Ven safe."

Eraqus, on the floor of his own hall, took the whole of it onto himself. "No, you were right. I failed you, Terra. Perhaps I've no one to blame but myself for the darkness inside you. And now I've done worse, raised my Keyblade against you and Ventus. My own heart is darkness!"

Xehanort came into the hall while he was saying it.

He came in without hurrying and he did not address Terra at all. "But once again you have it all wrong, Eraqus. Darkness is a beginning, you see, not an end."

Then he killed him, in front of the boy he had raised.

Eraqus went into light in Terra's arms and was not there any more.

Then Xehanort put darkness into the sky above the castle and let it fall.

The world went. Most of the castle came off the mountain and the four golden chains came down with it.

"You will pay, Xehanort! Was my Master, no, my father, Eraqus not enough for you? Leave my friends alone!"

He went after him. He was not in a condition to catch him and Xehanort had no intention of being caught yet.

Ventus saw none of it.

He came out of the corridor onto a beach and sat down on the sand and stayed there.

"Going somewhere?"

"Well, I'm just getting started with you. You're strong enough now to fulfill your purpose. So what are you waiting for? Join with me right here and now. Become the x-blade."

Ventus refused him outright. "No, I won't do it. He told me, the only way the x-blade can be forged is if you and me fight. Well guess what? I'm not fighting."

"You used to be too broken to talk back."

He tried it a few more ways and none of them worked, and then he stopped trying and used the one that would.

"Fine. Then I'll give you a reason to fight. Come and find me, at the one and only place to spawn the x-blade, the Keyblade Graveyard. There you're gonna see me choke the life out of Terra and Aqua. Then we'll see how long you play the pacifist."

He left him on the sand to think about it. It did not take long.

"Terra, Aqua. I swear I'll put an end to this."

Aqua found the mouse unconscious out in the Lanes Between and carried him to the tower.

While the duck and the dog were trying to wake him, the sorcerer told her the other thing.

"Aqua, the stars bring me grave news. Master Eraqus's star has blinked out."

He told her who had done it.

"No! That's absurd! Terra would never!"

"I hope with all my heart that you are right about your friend."

"Terra's heart is leading him to the ancient Keyblade Graveyard."

The Keyblade Graveyard

They arrived at the wasteland separately and within a short time of one another.

The place had a wide crater in the middle of a circular valley, and a barren field around the outside of the ridge, and a ring of stone pedestals. "What I do, I do for friendship," Terra said.

He told them about Eraqus before anything else, and he did not soften any of it, and he did not leave out his own part. "But I was tricked. Xehanort set the whole thing up, all so he could awaken the darkness inside me. You were right, Aqua, and so was the Master. I did need to be watched. I went astray, but no more."

"What else is darkness but hate and rage? Xehanort is feeding the dark fires within you, making you fight. You'll go astray again. Tell me, how does that honor our Master's memory, Terra?"

Then Ven told them what he was. "Xehanort wants me and Vanitas to fight, and make some kind of x-blade. But the Master said we can't let that happen, and he tried to destroy me for it."

He had thought about it the whole way here and he had arrived at one answer and he put it to them as a favour.

"I'm asking you, as a friend. Just, put an end to me."

Neither of them said no in words. "The three of us will always be one," Aqua said.

The old man came down the ridge on foot with the masked boy behind him. "Behold. These lifeless keys used to be full of power, united with the hearts of their masters. On this barren soil, Keyblades of light and darkness were locked in combat, as a great Keyblade War raged."

He said the weapon would be made today and the door would be opened.

He moved the ground first.

The valley came apart along lines of his choosing and put Terra on the far side of a gap that had not been there, and then every Keyblade in that part of the field came out of the stone at once and went through the air at him, and he went down under them.

He froze Ventus where he stood and walked him off the edge of the cliff.

Aqua caught him.

She was holding him with both arms when the man with the arrowguns came along the ridge. "How 'bout you leave the popsicle with me, so you can go have your little fight?"

"You think you two have got some grand role to play. As if."

"Go ahead if you wanna waste your time," Aqua said. "Keep trying to drive us apart with your mind games. It'll never work! Terra will prove to you he's stronger!"

She beat him. He was not there to win and he had cost her the time he had been sent to cost her.

"I keep forgetting, don't mess with Keyblade wielders. But you know what? That just means I made the right choice!"

He went.

Kingdom Hearts came up in the sky over the wasteland.

Terra got out from under the Keyblades and took his armour off, all of it, and threw it down and went at Xehanort with nothing on.

The masked boy put Aqua on the ground and stood over her with his Keyblade back.

The ice broke.

Ventus came out of it and hit him from the side and took him off her, and what followed was not like the fight in the badlands. Ven damaged him past the point where the body was going to keep working.

The masked boy stood up anyway, because there was still one thing available to him, and it was the thing he had been made for.

"You've done it, Ventus. Now that my body is about to perish, you and I will have to join together! The x-blade will be forged!"

He took the helmet off.

Under it was a young face with gold eyes and hair that was blue-black.

He put his creatures on Ven and they held him where he was, and the merger was not something Ven agreed to.

It went through anyway.

What stood up wore Ven's face and was not using it, and in its hand was the weapon.

It was two Keyblades crossed with the teeth turned outward, and it had come out wrong. The colour was red-orange where it should have been otherwise, and there was darkness coming off it, and there were chips out of the side of the blade, and a piece of the pattern was missing along one edge, and part of the hilt was not there.

A pillar of light went up out of the wasteland and could be seen from a long way off.

On the other side of the field Terra beat Xehanort.

He did it by going further into darkness than he had ever gone and he did it thoroughly, and Xehanort lay on the stones and was not distressed about it.

"At last, our moment is here. Out with the old and brittle vessel, and in with a younger, stronger new one!"

He put his Keyblade to his own chest and unlocked his own heart and threw it into Terra.

He had wanted a body that would last long enough to see what was on the other side of the war. This one would.

Terra reached for his armour to put between them and the armour did not come.

Afterwards the thing in his body explained the position to whatever was still in there listening.

"Darkness rules your heart, it gives me control. Muscle and sinew that once obeyed you now rebels against you."

The armour was lying where he had thrown it.

It stood up.

There was nothing in it. What was in it was the last thing he had been thinking when he took it off, which was that he was angry and that the other two had to be got out of this, and that turned out to be enough. It summoned its own Keyblade and it went at the thing wearing Terra and it beat it.

Then it could not do the next part, because there was no next part. It could win the fight and it could not get him back.

It drove its Keyblade into the ground and put both hands on the grip and stopped moving.

Before it stopped it said three things.

"Aqua, Ven. One day I will set this right."

It stayed where it was.

Aqua came round on the stones with the mouse standing over her.

"Gosh, I'm glad you're okay."

The thing with Ven's face was coming across the field with the weapon in its hand. "That's not Ven!"

"Shut up! I'm sick of your nonsense. Give Ven his heart back!"

The two of them fought it together and it was stronger than both of them and it put her down.

"Terra, Ven, lend me strength."

Inside Ventus, on a floor that had cracks running across it, the two of them had it out for the last time. "Our union was not finished. The x-blade shouldn't stay broken like this. Join me now, and we can complete the x-blade!"

Ven told him what he was going to do to it instead. "The x-blade is made of your heart, too, idiot. If you destroy it, your heart will vanish forever."

"At least I have some! I've become a part of their heart, just as they've become a part of mine. My friends are my power, and I'm theirs!"

"Hmph, it's always about your friends, isn't it?"

Ven destroyed him. That is to say, he took his own darkness back into himself, and for a moment there was nothing missing out of him at all.

Outside, Aqua got up and hit the weapon.

It cracked. Then it came apart in her hands and went on coming apart.

"Oh no! It, it's gone all haywire!"

It destroyed itself and took the wasteland with it as far as anybody could see.

The light picked all of them up and put them into the Lanes Between, every one of them, except the armour standing with its hands on its Keyblade, which the light went round.

Ventus put his own armour on as he went, without knowing he was doing it.

What Was Left

Terra was in three places.

His body was walking about with somebody else operating it. His heart was shut inside the thing that floated behind that body and went where it went. His will was standing in the wasteland with both hands on a Keyblade and would not be moving.

Ventus had destroyed his own darkness and got it back, and the heart it went back into was too damaged to keep. It left him. The body stayed alive and asleep.

Aqua was intact.

She was the only one of the three still able to go anywhere.

Castle Oblivion

She woke up in the tower and was told the two things in the order they had happened.

The mouse laid the Star Shard on the sorcerer's desk, and laid his Keyblade beside it, because he had gone out with both and come back having lost two people and saved neither.

The sorcerer picked up one of the two and gave it back to him, and smiled while he did it.

"Don't you worry, Aqua. I believe in Ven, too. Gosh, he's been as good a friend to me as anybody. And if both you and me believe in him with all our hearts, then he'll have two lights to follow instead of one."

The way home was opened by Ventus, who was unconscious throughout and did not know he had done it. His hand came up and the Keyblade came into it and the road was there.

The Land of Departure was in pieces.

The chains were down and the spires were gone and most of the building had come off the mountain. In the forecourt, lying where it had been dropped, was Eraqus's Keyblade.

She picked it up.

There were three thrones at the top of the hall and she put Ven in the middle one. "I'll keep him safe, until he wakes. Forever if I have to."

Then she did the thing she had been taught to do on the afternoon she was made a Master, in the room where she had been taught it, with the Keyblade of the man who taught her.

She found the Keyhole and she sealed it, and the world changed while she was standing in it.

What it became was white and it was a labyrinth, and there was no way through it for anybody who did not already know what it had been. Which was the point. The room with the thrones in it stopped being a throne room.

"I know it's a lonely place, but you'll be safe. Terra and I will be back to wake you up before you know it."

Before she went she laid the Master's Defender down flat, and put the three charms on it. Hers, and Ven's, and Terra's.

Aqua's were blue with cyan at the tips. Ven's were light green with sea green at the tips. Terra's were orange with yellow.

The Dark

She heard him while she was still in the corridor.

"Aqua. Put an end to me."

"Terra, tell me where to find you."

It took her to the city.

He was standing in the square in the middle of the city, and behind him there was a shape in the air that went where he went.

He looked like Terra and he was not sure whether he was. There were two hearts in that body and they were both talking and he had to answer with one mouth, and what came out was confused about which of them it belonged to.

"Such a terrible. Darkness. Fight it. Terra, please!"

He took hold of her.

"My name is Master Aqua. Now return my friend's heart or pay the price!"

She fought him and the thing behind him, and partway through it Terra came up through his own face for a few seconds and she saw him do it.

What Xehanort did about that was turn his Keyblade on the body he was standing in and burn Terra out of it.

It worked and it cost more than he had budgeted for. It took his own memory with it, all of it, down to one word, which was his name. And it opened underneath him and started pulling him and the shape behind him down.

Aqua went in after him.

She got hold of him inside the corridor and she was holding him when she worked out the arithmetic. She could put one of them back up into the light and not two.

She took her armour off.

She used it and her Keyblade together to throw the body back up the way they had come, and everything she had was in the throw, and there was nothing left over to hold herself with.

"I have to do something or we'll both be lost. I'm with you. Go! Ven, I'm sorry. I might not make it back as soon as I thought. But I promise I'll be there, one day, to wake you up."

She went down with the Master's Defender and nothing else.

On the islands two boys were sitting on the sand at the end of the day.

The younger one was crying and could not say why, because there was no why. He had been perfectly all right a minute before.

The older one thought about it and offered him an explanation. Someone a long way off must be sad, and if he called out with his heart the sad person might hear him.

So he did.

In the room where Aqua had left him, Ventus answered him.

In the city, in the square, a young man was lying beside a Keyblade and a set of armour that were not his.

The man with the eyepatch brought two people to look at him. One was the man who ran that castle, older, with long blond hair slicked back and a short moustache and beard, bright orange eyes and slightly pointed ears, in a white coat over a grey waistcoat and a violet ascot, with a red shawl across his shoulders. The other was one of his guard.

"Young man, what ails you? Can you speak? Tell me your name."

He said Xehanort.

The man with the eyepatch was pleased about that and did not explain why.

"Quickly, get him to the castle!"

The guard picked up the Keyblade and the armour and carried them away.

The place Aqua had gone down into had its own ground, stone with blue light coming up through the cracks in it, and rock shapes coming out of the walls, and paths that wound and doubled and joined each other again, and no light in it except a white cold one a long way off that never got any nearer.

They came at her out of it in numbers and kept coming.

She got to the point where stopping was the reasonable thing.

Then there were two lines of light standing in the dark in front of her, and they were Keyblades, and one of them was Terra's and one of them was Ven's, and neither of the people who owned them was in any condition to have sent them.

She took her charm out and looked at it and went on.

A long way from there, a boy called Sora stood in a round place with his own face under his feet.

He was four. Something came down out of the dark above him and stopped in front of him, and it was a heart with nothing round it, and it asked him whether it could come back.

He said yes. He said it could stay in him and rest until it was better.

"Thank you."

Inside the body the argument was still going on and neither of the two in it could be overheard by anybody.

Xehanort wanted to know how there was anything left of the boy at all.

"It's still my heart. You think you can just come in and take over? I'm not gonna sit by and let that happen."

"Wrong. You're gonna get shown the door, old man."

"I'm not afraid of what the darkness holds now. Even if you do wrestle control of my heart from me, even if you cast me into the deepest, darkest abyss, you'll never sway me from the one cause that pushes me to keep on fighting. Whatever the cost, I'm ready to pay it."

And there was a reason he could still say any of it, and he gave it. There was another heart in there with him and it was standing between him and the rest of it.

Xehanort recognised it.

He treated the whole thing as a delay on one of several roads he had open.

Some while later the young man walked a corridor in that castle with his hair grown longer and gone silver, in a white coat like the ones the men there wore, and his eyes were brown.

The man with the eyepatch walked beside him and talked at him and got nothing back, and worked out what had happened, and then stopped walking and asked him straight out whether he was Terra.

He got silence.

He said he had his back either way, and went on down the corridor with him.

Two people were sitting further along eating ice cream, one of them the master of that house and one of them a child, and they watched the pair go past and said nothing about it.